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The
Streets: Breaking out of the Black Box/White Cube in
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To
discover a city through film – and I don’t mean through narratives that
nostalgically recount a director’s homeland, or carefully constructed sequences
that linger on the back alleys of Berlin or sidewalk cafes of Paris, but rather
through what I am terming the cinematic
experience of localities – is a precise description of how I felt
traversing the various locations of XL: A
City Symphony at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in January/February
2011. From optical illusions at an optometrist’s (XL26: Werktank, Statics + Reverse Blinking) to the
projection of landscape vistas in a cafe (XL33: Valentin Stefanoff, The World Is Too Much with Us II) and
the presentation of experimental film at a fitness club (XL6: The WORM
Abnorminal Fitness Club), Edwin Carels’ programme literally exploded into the
streets of
Rotterdam.
Embracing
the possibilities offered by A City
Symphony, I made it my mission (only half-seriously at first, but by the
last day it had become a quasi-obsession) to see, visit and engage with all
forty locations. Although I didn’t quite make it to all of them, I did manage
thirty-six; a filmic journey of sorts that not only encouraged me to visit places
I would not normally venture (the Sonneveld house or the Maritime Museum, for
example), but also offered up a series of recurrent themes, or tendencies, that
were reflected throughout the film festival and, more broadly, pointed to a
number of trends in contemporary culture.
A
chance meeting with Carels at the screening of Michael Hirsch’s 1972 underground
classic Voulez-vous coucher avec God? (XL7) led to an interesting discussion about the genesis and execution of the ‘extra-large’
programme which, more than a poetic coincidence, had forty locations to
celebrate, and help publicise, the fortieth birthday of the film festival. Working
with what Carels termed as ‘an xs budget’, the interdisciplinary programme recuperated
an aspect of the festival – the experience and collaboration with artists – that
had been lost in previous years. Departing from a broad notion of the cinematic,
each of the locations, and their corresponding work, sought to challenge the
expectations of the viewer, artist and site. Carels saw his role as a
coordinator of the forty sites rather than curator; taking what he called a ‘democratic
approach’, he entered into an open dialogue with the various
In
line with this general aesthetic, Carels’ pet project Not Kidding sought to address the limits of innovative cinema and
its connection to the past in a space oriented toward a diverse audience. It
was a platform for exploring the liberation of being a child; ‘a programme
about infancy rather than for infants’, it featured TV dinners (with accompanying
films by the likes of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine), workshops on how to
scratch a 16mm movie, and avant-garde shadow puppetry. (1) This positioning of the
viewer to engage with films and exhibitions from a perspective of childlike
abandon, that is, without the preconceptions and critical distance that so
often characterises our interaction with art and film, was an underlying trend
of the XL programme.
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1. The author in conversation
with Edwin Carels, 3 February 2011.
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Child of the pure unclouded brow And dreaming eyes of wonder! Though time be fleet, and I and thou Are half a life asunder, Thy loving smile will surely hail The love-gift of a fairy-tale. – Lewis Carroll (2) |
2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice
Found There (London: Macmillan & Co., 1872), p. 7.
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One
of the emblematic genres of children’s literature is the fairytale – although,
originally, as with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, adults were also an
intended audience. It is a form of storytelling that speaks to the imagination,
characterised by indeterminate time and place, supernaturalistic settings,
folkloric characters, a complete abandonment of the laws governing the universe
and a dismantling of society’s conventions. Many of the works and films in the
festival were underpinned by a fairytale aesthetic but, leaving behind the
saccharine adaptations made famous by Walt Disney, they signalled the reprise
of a more grown-up spectator and a return to the latent darkness or perversity
characteristic of the traditional fairytale. Spectators were offered a banquet
of other-worldly environments and dark enchantments, such as in Catherine
Breillat’s La belle endormie (Sleeping Beauty, 2010), where a
coming-of-age fantasy is set within the labyrinthine dream world of a young
princess; the series of short films Fairytales
Freak Me Out in the Out of Fashion programme; and the surreal or fantastic tone featured in many of the
exhibitions in A City Symphony.
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Zach
Gold, film still from String Theory,
2010, colour/ b&w video, 11 min, no dialogue.
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Fairytales Freak Me Out was a series of nine
short films united by their engagement with elements of the fairytale. Ranging
from animation to live action, poetic expression to publicity, and short story
narrative to abstract expression, it was one of the standout sections of the Out of Fashion programme. Rather than
the feel-good hills of Julie Andrews/Maria von Trapp, viewers were presented
with tales of dark longing, nostalgia and decadent beauty. Two of the more
dynamic films were Zach Gold’s String
Theory and the Quay Brothers’ Wonderwood,
both of which were products of direct collaboration with the respective fashion
houses A. F. Vandevorst and Comme des Garçons. In String Theory, a sexually charged atmosphere forms the setting for
an adolescent girl who moves in and out of conscious reality. Like La belle endormie, the dream sequences
seamlessly progress from one to the next to create a hallucinatory narrative in
which the ‘everydayness’ of props such as lamps, crockery and feminine trinkets
is turned into something of a more sinister nature. In the Quay Brothers short,
the olfactory traits — the woody notes — of Commes des Garçons’ new perfume Wonderwood
are translated into visual signs: acorns, pine needles, parquetry, brightly
coloured woodpeckers and a wooden puppet. The animated forest iconography is
set within the confines of an inky black environment, reminiscent of the
foreboding woods found in childhood classics such as Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel
and Gretel.
The
absurd and fantastic elements that form an essential component of fairytales
permeated many of the XL exhibitions. Jan Svankmajer’s Surviving Film (XL: 10) presented the collages from his latest
stop-animation film Surviving Life,
in which reality and dreams merge to create scenes that are both unnerving and
humorous. A somewhat conflicting emotional response was likewise expressed in
the exhibition Cruel to be Kind (XL:
16), which displayed the drawings and short films of the Russian animator Igor
Kovalyov (perhaps better known for his work on the Simpsons, Rugrats and Aaahh!! Real Monsters). The various short
films, which spanned a period of more than twenty years, featured his
distinctive stocky figures, grainy patina and natural or domestic settings.
Despite the rather innocuous locations in which Kovalyov situates his stories,
they are transformed into sites of seedy repute in the unfolding of his
dystopian narratives, where simple human actions and relations (feeding a baby,
kissing, salutary greetings) have an undeniably lurid character. Kovalyov’s
exhibition also highlighted one of the recurring problems of the XL programme:
the often unsuitable lighting in the presentation of film and video art within
the white cube. Kovalyov’s drawings were hung on the walls of the same room in
which the videos were displayed and, consequently, either the room was so flooded
with light it was impossible to view the films, or the room was darkened to an
extent that the particularities of the drawings became obscure. Considering the
interdisciplinary nature of the programme, it is unfortunate (although perhaps
not surprising, considering the enduring problems that the dialogue between art
and cinema consistently presents) that curatorial issues of this nature were
not resolved. (3)
Guillaume
Paris’ exhibition Permanent Eternity (XL: 12) brought together the ‘permanent videos’ the artist has been making
since 1994. The short scenes of these videos play in a continuous loop, locking
the characters and objects into a paradox of static movement from which they
will never be liberated. Of particular interest was the artist’s appropriation
of characters or vignettes from Walt Disney classics, such as the owl from Sleeping Beauty in Minding (1994) or Pinocchio in Fountain (1994) and Out of the Whale (2008).
Dislocated from their narrative structure, the familiarity of these fairytale
characters took on an uncanny aspect, the hope suggested by the original
stories transformed into a moribund despair.
David
Blair took the spectator on a historical journey to the discovery of telepathic
cinema in the all-encompassing work Movietalkers
of the Manchurian Telepathic Cinema (XL: 11). Described by Carels as a
‘living Wikipedia of media archaeology’, Blair created an environment
reminiscent of the history museum, presenting documentaries about
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3. See in particular Adrian
Martin, ‘La luz imperfecta: el cine y la galería’, Secuencias, no. 32 (July 2011), pp. 89-106.
4. Conversation with Carels. |
Guillaume
Paris, Out of the Whale, 2008, real
time evolving permanent video, HD plasma screen, computer, colour, silent.
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Departing
from the darkness of these fairytale-inspired works, and reconnecting with
Carels’ Not Kidding, was Abner Preis’
solo exhibition The Adventures of the The
Great Abnerio (XL: 22) at the Showroom MAMA. More than an installation,
Preis created an entire world of childlike enchantment that recounted the
stories and adventures of Abnerio – a strong man in his own travelling show.
Upon entering the space, visitors were instructed, by a set of rules, to:
smile, take off their shoes, walk on the clouds rather than the ice floor, be
nice to the animals, have fun and play. And one couldn’t help but play,
listening to stories like ‘The Wishing Well’ and ‘The Travelling Turtle’ while
surrounded by soft toys whose faces were garishly refashioned by thick paint
into clowns, and fooling around on the merry-go-round. Surrounded by texts such
as ‘love more, live more’, the experience of Preis’ world was like
rediscovering the uninhibited freedom of childhood.
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Abner
Preis, Showroom mama Abnerio, from The Adventures of The Great Abnerio,
2010, mixed medium.
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Personal Experience and Collective
Memory
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A good work of art can never be read in one way ... An artwork is open – it is the spectators looking at the work who make the piece, using their own background ... It has to be ‘unfocused’ somehow so that everyone can recognise something of their own self when viewing it. – Christian Boltanski (5) |
5. Christian
Boltanski, ‘Tamar Garb in conversation with Christian Boltanski’, in Christian
Boltanski, London: Phaidon Press, 1997, p. 24.
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The
representation or chronicling of personal and intimate narratives was another
recurrent trend throughout the XL programme. Not too surprising in a world
that, today, is obsessed with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – domains in which
sharing our random thoughts, photos and relationship status has become almost
second nature. However, this underlying presence of the personal was more than
the skin-deep communication associated with social networking sites. Spectators
were taken to the inner workings of consciousness in Peggy Ahwesh’s The Ape of Nature (XL: 9), where actors
were filmed under hypnosis; into the private stories of home movies at the
event Home Sweet Home Movie (XL: 13)
in the Antonius Binnenweg nursing home; and offered glimpses into the lives of
eight-year-old children in Johan Kramer’s filmic portraits Farewell Super8 film! (XL: 18). What is notable about these films and
events is the way in which they transcend, in a variety of media forms and
cinematic approaches, the particularities of individual identity, functioning
instead as a witness to collective memories, resonating with ideas or emotions
of a more universal nature: the human unconscious, post-industrial malady,
nostalgia, longing, youth and loss.
This
transformation of the personal story into an exposé of universal significance
was executed to stunning effect in The
Final Countdown (XL: 1) by Koen Theys. Theys collected over 2000 YouTube
video clips in which individuals or groups, bands or orchestras, reality TV
contestants or entire stadiums, render the first bars of the chart-topping song
‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe. Collaging these vignettes into a continuous
loop of the opening notes, Theys turns what could have been a monotonous homage
to ‘80s kitsch rock into a stunning and joyful crescendo of a famous riff.
After the opening shots, which rather comically show the first notes being
played on pint-sized instruments associated with child’s play, Theys takes us
on a journey across different continents and demographics, offering glimpses
into people’s lounge rooms, the rock-star fantasies of teenage boys, the
self-conscious styling of a young woman and even the thumping bass of a rave
party. The wide range of the performances is not only revealing of the song’s
worldwide popularity, but also a fascinating anthropological account of the
contemporary human condition, exposing underlying similarities despite differences
in age, gender or race. While the bravado and exhibitionism of the people is
clearly apparent, Theys’ work also functioned as a mirror reflecting our own
concomitant (perhaps guilty?) voyeurism. It is not just that our generation
wants to share; we also want to glance into people’s dreams, laugh at their
failures or cringe at their humiliation. Ultimately, however, Theys’ work does
not seek to pass judgement; there is no moralistic undertone, rather it is a
memoralisation of our desire to perform for an audience.
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Koen
Theys, video stills from The Final Countdown,
2010, video installation for three projectors, 3 X DV PAL + 48'46" color –
stereo.
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In and Out of Site/Cite/Sight
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If one accepts the proposition that the meanings of utterances, actions, and events are affected by their ‘local position’, by the situation of which they are a part, then a work of art, too, will be defined in relation to its place and position. – Nick Kaye (6) |
6. Nick Kaye, Site-specific Art Performance, Place and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 1. |
For
Carels, a guiding principle in compiling the XL programme was the relationship
between a work of art, or film, and its site; the idea that locations outside
the traditional exhibition space of the white cube/black box could provide an
illuminating exhibition framework that enhanced the meaning of the work and the
experience of the viewer. It was, for me, one of the most innovative aspects of
the entire festival, producing some highly evocative results: opening up new
spaces for experimental media and re-mapping the boundaries of the exhibition
space.
The
artist-filmmaker Leslie Thornton was personally invited by Carels to
participate in the XL programme, and the correlation between the site (Natural
History Museum) and her work (in which the source imagery was predominantly
derived from photographs of dead animals) revealed a highly cohesive curatorial
process. (7) Thornton’s series of monitor works entitled (((((Binoculars))))) (XL: 19) displayed two symmetrical circles,
onto which were projected contrasting images; one representative, presenting
close-up views of animals, such as antelope horns, the steely eye of a
crocodile or the discarded skin of a snake; and the other abstract, which
rendered a kaleidoscopic effect of the corresponding animal image. The
binocular view was overlaid with the shadowy forms of visitors to various
natural history museums, their chitchat intermingling with a haunting, sci-fi
soundscape. I was told that, before viewing Thornton’s work, I should first
visit the permanent displays and dioramas of the museum. Although unwillingly following
the advice (I must admit that I am not a fan of taxidermy creatures or
miniature models displaying the imagined life of dinosaurs), it did indeed
provide the best context through which to approach Thornton’s work. The
conscious framing of (((((Binoculars))))) within Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum positioned the viewer of her work not
only as a spectator but also as the subject, creating a platform for the
examination of our own viewing practices.
Another
successful marriage between work and exhibition location was Hans op de Beeck’s
film Sea of Tranquillity (XL: 27)
screened in the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. The site not only reflected the
maritime subject matter of Beeck’s film, but the journey taken to arrive at the
screening room — which took you from the grand foyer, up a series of
nondescript stairs and into the enveloping darkness of the screening room — was
itself a poetic extension of the journey described by Beeck. His film took the
viewer on a night-time tour of a mythical, haunting cruise ship, from the
mechanical workings of the engine room to the operating table of a surgery.
Combining live action and computer-generated imagery, Beeck creates hyperreal
images, where a sense of something sinister, or quasi-surreal, insistently
lurks beneath the photo-realist perfectionism of the exterior. We are shown the
carnivalesque dancers of a theatre show, a lone diner sitting down to eat a
pâté of blue jelly, and the sensual performance of a cabaret singer. The film
evokes what amounts to the superfluous nature of today’s cruise liner, where
the principles of leisure and entertainment take precedence over any
requirement of travel – thus offering an inadvertent echo of a key plank in
Rotterdam’s cinema programming this year, Godard’s Film Socialism (2010).
Although
this form of site/cite programming was, for the most part, successful, there
were two notable exceptions: Juliana Borinski’s Liquid Crystal Displays at Huis Sonneveld (XL: 15), in which there
was an absolute discord between her LCD projections displaying the process of
crystallisation (and I’m not even going to begin to discuss the sheer banality
of this work) and its location within the 1930s hypermodern home-turned-museum;
and Werktank’s Statics + Reverse Blinking at Oogziekenhuis Rotterdam (XL: 26) where, despite a greater harmony between
work (optical illusion) and site (optometrist), I had an incredibly frustrating
experience with the receptionists insisting there was no video art and did I
have an appointment and, if not, could I please make way for the next patient?
So,
why out of sight? The absence of concerted publicity was perhaps one of the
greatest downfalls of the programme. Despite the numbers and white flags
stationed outside buildings that signalled each of the forty locations, the XL
programme seemed more of an aside than an integral part of the film festival,
sliding out of the mainstream cinema-goer’s view. Indeed, one of the most
prevalent responses I heard from fellow festival goers, as I recounted the
numerous XL exhibitions I had visited that day, was ‘I’ve seen none’, as if A City Symphony was a sort of watered
down, faux-serious film programme hardly worthy of genuine ‘cinematic’
attention. I don’t wish to make an argument for viewing Carels’ programme based
on the big names or films (though there were plenty: Thornton, Quays and
Svankmajer, to name a few) that were present, but rather because it brought
together film, time-based works, experimental media, architectural space,
paintings and drawings to propose new frameworks of viewing, new spaces for
screening and new possibilities for a rapprochement between the at times
hostile worlds of art and cinema. These ideas were also critically discussed in
the two-day conference on artists’ filmmaking, Imagine an Audience held at the Piet Zwart Institute (XL: 3).
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7. Leslie Thornton, interview with Cognac Wellerlane, Winkleman Gallery, New York (10 June 2011).
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![]() Hans op de Beeck, film still from Sea of Tranquility - the movie, 2010, full HD video, colour, sound (29'50") |
So,
why out of sight? The absence of concerted publicity was perhaps one of the
greatest downfalls of the programme. Despite the numbers and white flags
stationed outside buildings that signalled each of the forty locations, the XL
programme seemed more of an aside than an integral part of the film festival,
sliding out of the mainstream cinema-goer’s view. Indeed, one of the most
prevalent responses I heard from fellow festival goers, as I recounted the
numerous XL exhibitions I had visited that day, was ‘I’ve seen none’, as if A City Symphony was a sort of watered
down, faux-serious film programme hardly worthy of genuine ‘cinematic’
attention. I don’t wish to make an argument for viewing Carels’ programme based
on the big names or films (though there were plenty: Thornton, Quays and
Svankmajer, to name a few) that were present, but rather because it brought
together film, time-based works, experimental media, architectural space,
paintings and drawings to propose new frameworks of viewing, new spaces for
screening and new possibilities for a rapprochement between the at times
hostile worlds of art and cinema. These ideas were also critically discussed in
the two-day conference on artists’ filmmaking, Imagine an Audience held at the Piet Zwart Institute (XL: 3).
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Critical Frameworks
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The definition of cultural nobility is the stake in a struggle which has gone on unceasingly, from the seventeenth century to the present day, between groups differing in their ideas of culture and of the legitimate relation to culture and to works of art, and therefore differing in the conditions of acquisition of which these dispositions are the product. – Pierre Bourdieu (8) |
8. Pierre Bordieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 2. |
One
of the underlying trends of Carels’ programme was the presence of new media
both as a form of source material and as the platform for the presentation of
artistic films. Most memorable was, for me at least, Maki Ueda’s Palm Top Theatre (XL: 20) in which a
selection of international artists produced 3D films for iPhones and iPads. The
short films were, in themselves, relatively simple, dominated by moving
computer graphics set to a soundtrack of digital music; nonetheless, they
flagged a shift in the way we view film and art that was also addressed by Imagine an Audience.
Two
of the more illuminating sections included ‘Giving It Away? – The Internet’ and
the panel discussion ‘Limited Editions – Filmmaking for the Fine Art System’.
Illuminating because the two sessions were essentially situated at the extremes
of the divide defining the contemporary marketplace for art and film, between
the absolute democratisation of art capital on the Internet and the enclosed
ivory tower of the capitalist art system. On the one hand, speakers such as
Tommy Pallotta (American filmmaker and producer), Paul Keller (one of the
leading thinkers for Creative Commons in the Netherlands) and Bregjte van de
Haak (documentary filmmaker) advocated the Internet as an alternative system
for the financing, production and distribution of film, citing in support of
this position numerous successful examples of crowd funding (which can be
defined as the collective cooperation by people, usually on the Internet, who
network resources and funds to finance enterprises led by other people and
organisations), and the general ability to reach wider audiences. On the other
hand, the Scottish avant-garde filmmaker Luke Fowler argued against the
Internet, seeing the digital distribution of work as leading to a dislocation
between the artist’s intent and the work. For Fowler, the explication of a
work, especially that which explores new aesthetic languages, is essential;
without the framework of the gallery and its associated pedagogy, the viewer is
alienated.
For
me, this latter view bears witness to an outmoded approach to art making and
viewing, one that attempts to maintain the special status that a gallery
automatically assigns to a piece of art or film. Without the privilege, indeed nobility, imposed by the gallery system,
the artist is effectively faced with a whole new set of dynamics in the making
and presenting of art; intimidating, certainly, but surely nothing to shy away
from either.
In
this regard, Michel Chevalier’s contribution was particularly insightful. In
essence, he criticised the liberal market conditions of the art world because
they impede accessible channels of distribution, and therefore maintain art as
a bourgeois thing for bourgeois people. He discussed the emerging trends of
filmmaking in the domain of the gallery, defining three positions: the theatre
of sensibility (Matthew Barney), the Duchampian remix strategy (Pierre Huyghe)
and Good Conscience Generators (Hito Steyerl, Chto Delat). For Chevalier, these
modes are never really critical (the first two are accompanied by traditional art
objects/commodities, effectively undermining the subversion of the
‘non-sellable’ art film), never really political and always couched in the safe
rhetoric of neo-liberalism. What I find ultimately interesting about these
various positions is their differing relationship to what Bourdieu refers to as
cultural nobility. I think it is safe to say that with the increasing free accessibility to film and art, and,
the gallery’s loss of traction in defining taste,
we are at a juncture of how to define ourselves in relation to this so-called
nobility. Perhaps the capitalist economic model of art will find yet another
way to harness the potentialities of the Internet for its own end, or perhaps
we will see a new form of art democratisation; either way, the discussions
throughout this conference offered pertinent and topical frameworks from which
to approach the film festival itself.
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from Issue 1: Histories |
© Justine Grace May 2011. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |